Preface. As the Arctic ice melt accelerates due to climate change it could release more than 1 trillion pieces of plastic into the ocean over the next decade, possibly posing a major threat to marine life (Lewis 2014).
The rate at which ice is disappearing across the planet is speeding up, with 28 trillion tons of ice between 1994 and 2017 – equal to a sheet of ice 100 meters thick covering the whole of the United Kingdom (Slater 2021).
And 50 to 70% of Antarctic ice shelves could become weak and collapse from surges of melt water (Lai 2020).
Related:
2015: Plastic for dinner: A quarter of fish sold at markets contain human-made debris. Original article here]
Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com author of “Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy”, 2021, Springer; “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report
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Slater T, Lawrence IR, Otosaka IN et al (2021) Earth’s ice imbalance. The Cryosphere.
Ice melt across the globe raises sea levels, increases the risk of flooding to coastal communities, and threatens to wipe out natural habitats which wildlife depend on. Overall, there has been a 65 % increase in the rate of ice loss over the 23-year survey. This has been mainly driven by steep rises in losses from the polar ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland, where ice melt has accelerated the most int he world. Sea-level rise on this scale will have very serious impacts on coastal communities this century.
The majority of all ice loss was driven by atmospheric melting (68 %), with the remaining losses (32%) being driven by oceanic melting.
The survey covers 215,000 mountain glaciers spread around the planet, the polar ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, the ice shelves floating around Antarctica, and sea ice drifting in the Arctic and Southern Oceans.
Rising atmospheric temperatures have been the main driver of the decline in Arctic sea ice and mountain glaciers across the globe, while rising ocean temperatures have increased the melting of the Antarctic ice sheet. For the Greenland ice sheet and Antarctic ice shelves, ice losses have been triggered by a combination of rising ocean and atmospheric temperatures.
During the survey period, every category lost ice, but the biggest losses were from Arctic Sea ice (7.6 trillion tons) and Antarctic ice shelves (6.5 trillion tons), both of which float on the polar oceans.
Sea ice loss doesn’t contribute directly to sea level rise but it does have an indirect influence. One of the key roles of Arctic sea ice is to reflect solar radiation back into space which helps keep the Arctic cool.
Not only is this speeding up sea ice melt, it’s also exacerbating the melting of glaciers and ice sheets which causes sea levels to rise.”
Half of all losses were from ice on land — including 6.1 trillion tons from mountain glaciers, 3.8 trillion tons from the Greenland ice sheet, and 2.5 trillion tons from the Antarctic ice sheet. These losses have raised global sea levels by 35 millimetres.
It is estimated that for every centimeter (0.4 inch) of sea level rise, approximately a million people are in danger of being displaced from low-lying homelands.
Despite storing only 1 % of the Earth’s total ice volume, glaciers have contributed to almost a quarter of the global ice losses over the study period, with all glacier regions around the world losing ice.
Lewis R (2014) Arctic ice melt to release 1 trillion pieces of plastic into sea Increasing ice melt due to climate change will pose a major threat to marine life. Aljazeera.
This report, titled “Global Warming Releases Microplastic Legacy Frozen in Arctic Sea Ice,” said ice in some remote locations contains at least twice as much plastic as previously reported areas of surface water such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – an area of plastic waste estimated to be bigger than the state of Texas.
Researchers behind the report, published last week in the scientific journal Earth’s Future, said they found the unusual concentrations of plastics by chance while studying sediments trapped in ice cores. The researchers are based at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.
Many scientists and activists have raised alarms over the massive amount of plastic waste building up in the world’s oceans. In the film “Midway,” documentary maker Chris Jordan showed how tens of thousands of baby albatrosses are dying – their bodies filled with plastic most likely from the Garbage Patch – on the Pacific atoll of Midway, one of the most remote islands on the planet.
Increasing ice melt due to climate change will likely release the even-higher concentrations of plastic trapped in Arctic ice into the sea, and thus into the food chain, the new report in Earth’s Future said.
“The environmental consequences of microplastic fragments are not fully understood, but they are clearly ingested by a wide range of marine organisms including commercially important species,” the report said.
The term “microplastics” refers to tiny particles created as plastic materials that break down but never biodegrade. They are being increasingly found on surface waters and shorelines around the world.
Plastic materials are introduced to the ocean by various means, including from cosmetic ingredients known as microbeads, from the release of semi-synthetic fibers such as rayon from washing machines, and from larger discarded plastic items. The plastics reach the sea via sewers, rivers, and littering along coastlines or at sea.
Researchers said in the new report that Arctic ice contains such high concentrations of plastics because of the way sea ice forms. It concentrates particulates from the surrounding waters, and the particulates become trapped until the ice melts. Scientists said in the report that they found 38-234 plastic particles per cubic meter of ice in some parts of the Arctic areas they studied.
In the next decade the scientists predict that at least 2,000 trillion cubic meters of Arctic ice will melt. If that ice contains the lowest concentrations of microplastics reported in the study, this could result in the release of more than 1 trillion pieces of plastic, the report said.
Researchers worry that a wide range of organisms could ingest the microplastics, leading to physical injury and poisoning.
Plastic products often contain potentially harmful additives to make them last longer, the report said. Other studies have shown that small fragments of plastic can act a bit like magnets, attracting pollutants from the environment and making them even more toxic.
Other recent scientific studies have shown that tiny plastic “microbeads,” added to many body cleansers and toothpastes, have been found in major lakes and other waterways used for drinking water. The studies said the plastic balls absorb toxic chemicals released into the environment, and are then eaten by fish and thus introduced into the food chain.
Mass production of plastic began in the 1940s, and by 2009 at least 230 million tons of plastic were produced each year – equivalent to the weight of a double-decker bus every two seconds.
References
Lai CY, Kingslake J, Wearing MG et al (2020) Vulnerability of Antarctica’s ice shelves to meltwater-driven fracture. Nature 584.